It’s so over… We’re so back

They went to sleep

@anabology says they gave Opus 5.5 a prompt from @donaldjewkes, Midjourney and a moodboard. Twelve hours later, this was waiting for them. I’d like to know how much fixing it needed afterwards, but even taking the post at face value is enough to mess with my head.

I love the fashion lookbook thing. Escape Velocity, SS27. The little labels, the face tracking, all the numbers. It looks like someone is trying to sell me a jacket while telling me I’m going to be poor forever.

Later there’s a billboard with PERMANENT UNDERCLASS on it and another counting down the months. By then it’s down to six. They even gave it a little chart. As if I needed a dashboard for this.

And the stupid thing is, the song is catchy. I came here to watch an AI video and now I’m humming along to my own economic irrelevance.

Of course an AI made this

There’s something very funny about an AI making a video about how little time we have left to get ahead of AI. Someone went to bed and the computer spent the night making this. I don’t think I could have come up with a better way to make myself anxious.

The machine takes your job and you ask it to cheer you up: /loop make me happier.

I’m also curious about the moodboard. What did they give it? How much of the look was already there? The post tells us what tools they used, but I want to see what they started with.

It’s so over

The bit that worries me is getting started. If a company can give the junior work to an AI, who gets hired to learn? You can’t ask everyone to turn up with ten years of experience and stop giving people their first job.

The Stanford study linked here found employment among 22 to 25 year olds in AI-exposed jobs was 19% below where it would have been if it had kept pace with less-exposed peers. The gap mostly came from less hiring. The authors don’t claim AI caused all of it, or that jobs are disappearing across the whole economy.

Still, try being the person applying. “The whole economy is fine” isn’t much comfort when nobody calls you back.

That’s what I hear in “permanent underclass.” You’re trying to get somewhere and it keeps getting harder to start. Meanwhile the people who already own everything can afford to wait and see.

It’s so over.

We’re so back

Then I remember I can use these things too. That’s why I keep going back and forth on this. I’m worried about what AI does to work, and I also want to open my laptop and make something with it immediately.

A video like this would have been completely out of reach for most people a few years ago. Now I can look at it and wonder what would happen if I tried my own moodboard. I don’t need to convince a studio to let me have a go.

We’re so back.

I don’t have a neat answer for how those two feelings fit together. The song switching between them is pretty much where I’m at.

Do we actually have 18 months?

Where did that number even come from? I wouldn’t plan my life around it. Nobody has shown me why month nineteen is when we’re all screwed.

I do get the urgency. These tools keep doing things I wouldn’t have expected them to do yet. I want to spend more time using them and finding out what’s possible. I don’t need to believe in an exact deadline to care about that.

Easy to get carried away

The danger with this stuff is watching it at 2am and deciding you need to change your entire life before breakfast. Suddenly every trade looks like your last chance and every guy selling a course has the answer.

I’d be very suspicious of anyone taking “permanent underclass” and putting a buy button underneath it. Being scared makes you an easy customer.

Lock in

For me that means getting back to what I’m building. There’s enough unfinished work without adding a whole new life plan because a song got to me.

Use the tools on an actual problem. Finish something. See if anyone wants it. I’ll learn more doing that than watching another fifty people explain what AI is about to do to us.

And I’d like to see more people share the messy part. Show the prompt, the failed attempts, the stuff you had to fix by hand. The finished video is cool. Knowing how to get there would be useful.

18 months

Anyway, watch it. I still can’t decide whether it makes me want to work or stare at the ceiling for a bit. Probably both. Whoever put that moodboard together, I want to see the next one.

It’s so over.

We’re so back.

Lock in.